Lawsuit filed against company in Missouri duck boat sinking
MISSOURI (WISH) – A new federal lawsuit has been field over the sinking of a duck boat that killed nine members of an Indianapolis family in Missouri.
The suit claims the company ignored multiple warnings about potential disaster.
There’s many allegations inside the 43-page lawsuit which was filed Sunday for $100 million in damages.
The suit alleges that the company recklessly risked the lives of the people on board purely for financial reasons instead of canceling the boat ride and issuing a refund. It also says, “this tragedy was the predictable and predicted result of decades of unacceptable, greed-driven, and willful ignorance of safety by the Duck Boat Industry in the face of specific and repeated warnings that their Duck Boats are death traps for passengers and pose grave danger to the public on water and on land.”
The lawsuit say that an inspection from last year found the Duck Boats’ engines and bilge pumps that remove water from the hulls to be unsafe during bad weather and could fail. That’s because of improper placement of the boats exhaust system.
The lawsuit further says despite the second severe thunderstorm warning, the company insisted on taking the boat out onto Table Rock Lake. The company modified the tour schedule to take the water portion before the land portion an in effort to “beat the storm.”
The suit goes on to say that passengers were told they would not need their life jackets. Some of the information in the lawsuit matches what we heard from the NTSB Friday, after its preliminary review of video recorded on board the boat before it sank.
The full NTSB investigation into the sinking is likely to take a year to complete.